Articles by Leo Zhou

During this past spring break, I had the fortunate opportunity to visit Turkey in an all-expense-paid trip courtesy of the MIT-Sabancı University (SU) Freshman Scholar Program. A total of eight students were invited for a week-long stay at SU in Istanbul, Turkey by merit of their performance in freshman-level classes.

In the 2012-2013 academic year, MIT’s tuition and fees will increase by 3.25 percent to $42,050, while its financial aid budget is set to increase by 4.7 percent to $95.6 million, according to a release from MIT News Office. Though unmentioned in the release, self-help level has risen for students with family income of $75,000 or less from $4,400 to $6,000, but remains unchanged for other financial aid recipients who had to contribute $6,000 since last year, according to the MIT Student Financial Service website.

The Big Bang Theory is the flagship show of television nerdiness — being featured on the show means that, in some way, you reach over 15 million viewers. Physics professor Janet Conrad and many in her research group have been studying neutrinos with the Double Chooz experiment in France for a few years. Little did they expect to see their work on mainstream television last December.

U.S. Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate in Physics Steven Chu visited MIT to map out his strategies to restore U.S. competitiveness in clean energy in a talk at Kresge Auditorium this Wednesday. This is his first visit to the Institute since his Compton lecture in 2009. The event was sponsored by the student-run MIT Energy Club.

On Oct. 4, Adam G. Riess ’92 woke up to a 5 a.m. phone call from Sweden. The professor of astronomy and physics at John Hopkins University was told that he had won the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. Two others shared the prize: Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University.

Along with the rest of the U.K., the Cambridge side of the Cambridge-MIT Exchange (CME) Program is facing financial troubles this year. The number of students that the program can admit this year dropped to 15 each from Cambridge and MIT, down from 20–30 each in past years.

Tuition will increase 3.9 percent to $40,732 in the 2011-2012 academic year, according to a release from the MIT News Office. While the financial aid budget is also rising 5 percent to $91.3 million, the student self-help costs will increase from $3,400 to $4,400 for students with annual family income of $75,000 or less, and from $5,500 to $6,000 for the other financial aid recipients.

Changes are coming to the MIT Sailing Pavilion next year for its 75th anniversary: the pavilion will more than double in size, some boats will be gone, and new boats will come. The costliest of these changes is the $1.6 million dock renewal project planned by the MIT Nautical Association (MITNA) for the pavilion.

Four street robberies, possibly related, have been reported just north of campus in the past week, according to MIT Police. One incident involved an MIT instructor, and two others involved graduate students. No one was injured.

After two difficult years, MIT has “aligned its budget with economic realities” and has improved the institute’s economic resilience, President Susan J. Hockfield said at the annual State of the Institute forum on Wednesday.